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“... he adulated, had at the end of his life thought about writing a drama on the subject of ‘The French Police’. Bulwer-Lytton’s family loved Paris – his brother Sir Henry Bulwer, who was the inspiration of George Sand’s Mauprat, in 1834 published sketches of Parisian life which have the verve of Balzac – and his conception of Newgate fiction was ...”

“... In February 1976 Hilton Kramer gave his approval to Philip Pearlstein’s ‘remorseless articulation of the authentic’. In November of the following year he alerted his readers to the absence, in the art of David Hockney, of ‘the spiritual quest at the heart of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that other critics had announced ...”

“... San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen began in a small and intensely ...”

“... he grew delirious. News of his illness spread: prayers and fasts were organised and his father, Philip II of Spain, arrived at his bedside with physicians, nobles and prelates in tow. The doctors applied ointments and poultices and gave him strong purgatives. But after weeks of debate they decided to trepan his skull in order to relieve the pressure from ...”

“... for the scholar sufficiently rigorous in his principles. The more sceptical British bibliographer, Philip Gaskell, undermines this monist doctrine in From Writer to Reader (1978), where with self-conscious editorial quixotism he sets out to ‘establish’ the text of Stoppard’s Travesties. Using the playwright’s working script, various rehearsal and stage ...”

“... the Byronic hero, Julian, more romantically alive on the page. Julian is distantly modelled on Sir Philip Sidney but is based more immediately on Vita’s ideal version of herself. Violet suggested a detailed description of Julian’s appearance. ‘“Julian was tall,” let us say and “flawlessly proportioned”,’ she wrote to Vita on 5 June ...”

“... T.F. Henderson, dismissed this theory on the grounds that, unlike Bothwell, Darnley could not read French, but we can no longer be so sure of that. In 1965, a Newcastle doctor, M.H. Armstrong Davison, advanced the ‘other woman thesis’ – that some of the letters were written by an unknown spurned lover of Bothwell’s – which has influenced a number of ...”

“... has offered as her main reason for choosing to spend her old age in France the conviction that the French health services are far superior to the British, an opinion she has not had occasion to revise. As a young woman she wrote four accomplished but orthodox novels and seemed firmly established in London, but in 1964, after a dangerous illness, she ‘went ...”

“... trying to understand or at least come to terms with bebop (even the passionate jazz-conservative Philip Larkin eventually felt he had to make a gesture in this direction), but I don’t know how far I succeeded, except for an admiration for Thelonious Monk and an immediate passion for the supremely talented and intelligent Dizzy Gillespie, the most dazzling ...”

“... but the most loyal of friends. He’s a half-breed and a bastard. Part Vietnamese and part French, he speaks English with an American accent. He’s good at getting banged up, consigned to the hospital bed, the bin, the re-education camp, a dank basement or an empty warehouse staring into the barrel of a gun. He’s the offspring of paedophilia. He’s ...”

“... her lips. The Antiquary was published in 1816, not long after the Allies had insisted that the French return to Spain the paintings they had confiscated for the Musée Napoléon in the Louvre. Major works (by Titian, Raphael and probably Van Eyck, as well as by Spanish artists) which had been illegally removed and found their way into private collections ...”

“... concealed inside an early Elizabethan ring which once belonged to Winston Churchill. It was Sir Philip Sidney who said (not with Anne in mind but her daughter), ‘she was a queen and therefore beautiful,’ and much diplomatic comment on her exquisite good looks can be dismissed along with the misattributed portraits. There seems little doubt that she had ...”

“... be, Lawrence none the less succeeded, as we know, in exciting many of his readers. One of them was Philip Larkin, who always liked and admired Lawrence, considering him a criterion for the literary ‘non-bogus’. But Lawrence would not at all have cared for Larkin’s own use of the pornographic, in its higher or its lower manifestations. For Larkin, like ...”

“... As midwife to this book (its bibliographical history is tangled – parts are translated from the French, parts reconstructed, parts assembled from interviews) Marina Warner has done a great service. Carrington, like Denton Welch (both painters as well as writers) created a world coloured by an invalid’s intensity of feeling. Once tasted, its flavour is not ...”

“... belief. This is the second note very often struck by alienated Americans writing about America. Philip Roth in 1961: The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of ...”